 Illustration by Emil Alzamora |
Back in the spring, I warned that September through November was a time of "threading the eye of the nuclear needle." Many charts relevant to the discussion of atomic weapons and radiation are going off at once, if you'll excuse the pun. "This is a turning point in the history of the nuclear world," I wrote into the published caption of one of those charts, which will be exact November 6, but which has been rather active going back to late summer.
Let's back up a little, for the sake of anyone who is new to the astrology of the Bomb. There is one chart that is the basis of the discussion: The first time a self-sustaining nuclear reaction was created, as part of the Manhattan Project, in 1942 (the USA's then-secret program to make an atomic bomb). Remarkably, it was only 32 months between a chain reaction in a Chicago lab to the Hiroshima bomb that vaporized much of a city and killed and sickened hundreds of thousands of people; followed by Nagasaki, for which there was no excuse, military, political, moral, or otherwise.
The first self-sustaining reaction chart has a name—the Nuclear Axis. The "axis" part is a strip across early-to-mid Gemini and Sagittarius, and when these degrees of the zodiac are activated by passing planets (called a transit), the nuclear issue heats up dependably. Given that Pluto has recently covered the territory, we are lucky that we've done so well. But Uranus is now there, and its energy tends to be more overt and expressive rather than deep and mysterious like Pluto. Still, Pluto's journey across the axis (along with Saturn, in late 2001 through 2002) gave us the deep and mysterious September 11 incident, the physical location of which was called Ground Zero (previously, the term for the epicenter of a nuclear detonation).
What September 11 may have lacked in radioactivity it more than made up for in dioxin. This is a sad reality now coming home to the men and women who worked in New York City close to the fires and cleanup, where plastic, carpeting and chemicals smoldered for weeks. You get a lot of things from a fire like that, and you get a chemical called TCDD, tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin. It is a chemical with the power of radiation, measured in amounts as small as trillionths of a gram, when it's measured at all.
Yet the nuclear issue is lurking in the back of everyone's mind, and maybe closer to the front than usual. There are a lot of possibilities for things to go wrong, from a Russian suitcase nuke getting into the wrong hands, to use of a Made in USA tactical weapon or ten of them on Iran. It is not merely George Bush and Dick Cheney who put the thought into our heads, though they are not helping the situation. We have lived in the nuclear shadow for a long time. Everyone alive today has done most or all of their growing up knowing that it all could be over in 15 minutes, meanwhile being told that actually, those bombs made us safer.
If we knew how much human ingenuity, resources, and money that could have ended poverty and cured disease went into piling up nuclear weapons, we would have reason to grieve. Not that we don't anyway. I think everyone knows how dangerous the situation has been, and how much more dangerous it's becoming as the world situation is pushed to the brink and heated up to the flashpoint, but we just do what we can: Hope for the best.
And we can read the astrology. Why not; it's a good way to get some detachment. Here is the chart for the test, based on the seismic reading taken Monday. The coordinates used are those provided for the epicenter. The town listed is the closest to that point. Let's see what it reveals.
Let me get technical on you; for this section I must.